


against the bed (i see in red)

by scenedenial



Category: Secret History - Donna Tartt
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Canon Divergent, Drinking, Drugs, Fighting, Fisting, Kissing, Loneliness, M/M, PWP, Sex, Sexual Content, Smut, Thanksgiving, basically richard is alone at fran’s apartment for thanksgiving break being depressed and horny, first person POV, francis is a top cause DUH, its just shameless porn okay, post-murder, post-“matters progressed”, richard has (mostly) come to terms with himself, richard is depressed and misses francis, richard is here and queer, richard papen POV, they have a semi-established thing going on
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-29 15:28:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16746613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scenedenial/pseuds/scenedenial
Summary: The ten days I spend there without Francis are hellish, something out of a bleak, war-torn painting—all grey skies and bloodied, hopeless soldiers. I lay around in his bed, not sleeping until I take a pill or two from his medicine cabinet, and then passing out for five or six uninterrupted hours at a time, waking up in the same position I lay down in with drool all over my face. I flip through the channels on his grainy television and don’t shower or shave or change my pajamas. I snort thin lines of cocaine and regret it every time. I exist off of endless mugs of black tea with sugar and brandy, plus sour olives and tiny pickles and maraschino cherries that I eat straight from their jars, standing in front of the open fridge. Francis never keeps any fucking food in the place.





	against the bed (i see in red)

**Author's Note:**

> I’m rereading TSH and absolutely cannot stop thinking about these two. I really hope you all enjoy!

It is a Wednesday morning when I wake up in Francis’s freezing apartment to a hand on my face, still speeding my brains out (to use a Judy Poovey term) from the probably-laced coke that I snorted, disoriented and off-balance, from the edge of the sink in the middle of the night. 

Francis says something—it’s him, wearing that long black greatcoat with his hair all slicked off his face, leaning over me—that I can’t comprehend. His face is a blur, his words lost somewhere between his tongue and my eardrums. I murmur a _what_ that comes out as nothing more than an indistinct, asthmatic gasp. 

“Richard.” Francis says, voice all clipped and business-like. His face sways in and out of focus above me. “Richard, I’m leaving.” My stomach roils, mouth tasting of sour coffee and rotten vegetables. I contemplate the consequences of throwing up on Francis’s sheets, their thread count higher than what I’d make in a year of working in Doctor Roland’s office. Francis says something else in that same, urgent tone. “ _Richard_. Are you listening?”

“Where—“ I cough on the single syllable, “where are you going?”

“Fuck!” Francis bursts out, exasperated, and, upon as close of an examination as my swimming eyesight will allow, on the verge of tears. “Fuck, Rich, I _told_ you. I’ve been talking about this for _weeks_.” 

If Francis starts to cry, I really, really do not know what I’ll do. Cry myself, probably. I push up onto my elbows and squint at him through the glaring morning light that filters through his broken blinds. My brain is moving like a busted-up transmission on a car a couple of decades too old for the road. Nothing is working fast enough. 

“Boston!” He’s angry now, color burning high in his cheeks, his snowy pallor more shocking than ever in contrast. Freckles stand out around his lips and cheekbones; delicate, ginger boy. “Boston, for _thanksgiving_? To see my _mom_?”

“Oh.” Is all I can manage, still tripped-out and dizzy, heart pounding loud in my fingertips and ears. 

“I’m going to miss my flight!” He cries, a lock of carroty hair loosing itself from the gelled slick of it and flopping down over his forehead. He pushes it back with a thin white hand, pissed off, trembling. Gorgeous. “Fuck. _Fuck!_ ” He’s more than peeved about being late—anxious, afraid, I can smell it on his skin. I sit up, head pounding with sharp, unrelenting pain. _(Is this what it’s like, Henry? Is this what it’s like for days at a time when you lay flat on your back in a pitch-dark room with ice over your eyes?)_

“Fran...” I mutter, and it’s not a name he likes, not one he’ll tolerate, hardly. Except that it’s coming from me, and I reach out to clutch his hands tight in my own, bile rising in the back of my throat. “Look. I’ll call you a taxi.” 

“I’ve called one, idiot.” Francis says, but his voice has lost a fraction of its vitriolic, nervous edge. 

“You’ll be fine. Planes never take off at the right time anyway.” I can barely get it out, my head hurts so badly, but he’s watching me with big, hanging-on eyes and so I keep talking to him. “I’m sorry I forgot.” 

“You shouldn’t have.” He says, eyes teary behind his pince-nez. “You really shouldn’t have, Richard.”

“I know. I _know_.” I repeat, when he gives me a pitying, sarcastic look that I know so well from across the table at Macaulay dinners, usually directed at an incomprehensible-even-for-him remark from Henry, or some teasing bit of malice from Bunny. (That is, before we killed Bunny.) “Fuck, Francis, give me an inch. I’m blown out of my mind.” 

“Should’ve thought about that before snorting shit that _Cloke Rayburn_ sold you, asshole.” 

“Wait.” I say, to his back now, but I never get a chance to find out what got him mad all over again because he’s stormed out the door with his suitcase and shut me in with a bang. 

The ten days I spend there without Francis are hellish, something out of a bleak, war-torn painting—all grey skies and bloodied, hopeless soldiers. I lay around in his bed, not sleeping until I take a pill or two from his medicine cabinet, and then passing out for five or six uninterrupted hours at a time, waking up in the same position I lay down in with drool all over my face. I flip through the channels on his grainy television and don’t shower or shave or change my pajamas. I snort thin lines of cocaine and regret it every time. I exist off of endless mugs of black tea with sugar and brandy, plus sour olives and tiny pickles and maraschino cherries that I eat straight from their jars, standing in front of the open fridge. Francis never keeps any fucking food in the place. I ignore calls from Henry and Charles and even Camilla, once or twice, letting the line ring out in the way that Francis could never stand to. I‘m depressed, probably, still fucked up from a couple too many awful trips, far too close together for comfort. The air is cold and never seems to adjust, even with the thermostat cranked all the way to the right. Everything smells like Francis, like _missing_ and _gone_ and _loneliness_. 

At night I lay on the side of the bed where the mattress has adjusted to his body and breathe it in until I’m either thick-throated with tears or gasping with my hand moving in jerky, unsteady motions between my legs, goaded on my his smell and his voice in my head. _Richard. Pretty boy. Sweet boy. My plaything. You were there you were there you were there youwerethere._

I never come on his sheets. The same rules for vomiting still apply here. I stumble up, at the second-to-last moment, and fumble my way into the bathroom where I’ll clench my hand around my throat, pressed right up into the base of my jaw, and pretend it’s as thin and cold and right as his is. It’s depraved, perverted, so disgusting even now that a piece of me has to shut down, has to go dead, first. But I keep forcing my eyes shut and forcing my thighs apart and seeing him go down to his knees in one fluid, ethereal motion that’s too lovely to bear. _Francis Abernathy, how do I stand this?_

The day before he’s set to come home, I whip myself up into such a nervous, edgy frenzy that I cannot sit still, can’t focus on books or television or the radio, can’t even breathe right. I clean every inch of his place, moving things off the counters into small, heaped piles in order to dust the horizontal surfaces with a rag. I wash every dish in the cabinets, including novelty Christmas shot glasses that I’ve never once seen Francis use, and set them to dry on the rack in the sink. I scrub out the bathtub, and go so far as to consider cleaning the toilet as well, but think the better of it. Then I get in the shower and, for a stretch of time that I can’t begin to estimate, stand there with scalding water pouring over my face and head and down my aching, bruised limbs. I wash my hair, and wish the hands in it were his. I touch myself, and wish the hands in me were his. 

His flight lands, and I don’t go to pick him up at the airport, even though I want to so badly that my hands are almost screaming to be on the wheel of his car. He doesn’t call from the airport, and I didn’t think he would, but a part of me is still watching the phone, fine-tuned to the smallest noises, jittering. 

As it happens, I’m not even in the front room when he opens the door with his key and drops his bags to the ground with a thud. I’m in the bathroom, leaning over the sink to stare at myself in the mirror, messing with my hair, when I hear it. When I come out to see him, at a clip that isn’t quite a run but couldn’t be construed as a walk either, he shouts and fumbles the key, sending it clattering onto the tile.

“ _Jesus_ , Richard! Way to give me a damn heart attack! I had no clue that you were still here.” He stoops for the keys, almost loses his grip on them again but manages to set them on the kitchen counter with no further mishap. He’s wearing the same black greatcoat he left in. His face is wan and sweaty. 

“Sorry.” I eke out, lamely, caught up in the loose fall of his hair and the startled flush of his neck. “I’m still here.” 

“Did you ever leave?” He sounds like he has a cold. Or it’s the dry airplane air, or maybe just the trek up from the street in the snow. I want to put the flat of my palm against his forehead, check for a temperature.

“No.” I mutter, suddenly embarrassed, no, _mortified_ , at how it must look to him. Me, hanging around like some soldier’s wife, cleaning his apartment and doing his dishes, sleeping in his bed. Jesus _fucking_ Christ. “I’m sorry, I just—“

He sinks down onto one of the barstools, not bothering to shed his coat or scarf, and clasps his fists together in front of him.

“Listen, Richard...” His brows are knit in the middle of his forehead. He looks exhausted. (Francis is a nervous flier; all nausea and shuffling and rereading of the safety pamphlet.) “I mean, it’s fine, just.” He trails off. I swallow around the lump in my throat, feeling gloomier than I did in all the time I was missing him. “It would have been nice if you’d told me you were staying.”

“Sorry.” I repeat, cold and sick to my stomach and miserable. He takes of his pince-nez, setting them on the countertop, and rubs at his eyes. “Sorry.” 

“It’s... fine.” His voice is so even that I can’t understand what the inflection is trying to tell me. 

“How was your trip?” I ask, an awkward attempt at changing the subject that leaves my face red. 

“Fine.” Buzzword of the day, it seems. “The usual.” I take ‘the usual’, for the Boston visits, to mean vodka sodas and croquet and dinners at the country club with the wealthy families Ms. Abernathy associates with, with sleeping pills and a few tense conversations about whether Francis has found a _nice girl to settle down with_ sprinkled in. I roll over my idea of what would happen if Francis took me home to his grandparents in my mind and almost laugh. “Snow, drinking, cards. How were things here?”

“Quiet.” I answer truthfully. _Lonely_ , I don’t say. “Listen, Francis.” I swallow, too loudly. “Are you still angry with me? About the morning you left?” He goes stony-faced and stares down at the countertop. I study the slope of his shoulders and think about his hand on my face in that raft on the lake. 

“I don’t know. Sort of.” 

“Why?” I ask, an unflattering desperation coloring my voice. “I mean, I know why, but... is it just because I didn’t remember your trip?” 

“I just...” His voice breaks, and I almost, almost reach out to touch him. “I just don’t know what we’re doing, Rich.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, my stomach an anxious, weighty pit.

“Like... am I supposed to be okay with you coming to bed off your face? Am I supposed to worry about that? Am I supposed to hold you to things or not? How much am I supposed to _trust_ you? How much is too much?” His voice is thin and rising as he speaks. He wrings at his hands. 

“I...” I don’t know what to say, or what he wants to hear. “What do you _want_ , Francis? You don’t want me to be your boyfriend. And I’m good with that, I don’t want it either. But what?” He looks stricken, like I’ve slapped him. God, sometimes I want to slap him. To see the red imprint of his face and to kiss it away. 

“I don’t...I don’t want you coming to bed on _coke_.” He says it in this throaty, broken voice that cuts right at my chest. “And I want you to remember the stuff I tell you. At least the important stuff.” And when he says it I realize how bare that minimum is, how little he expects of me and how I’ve failed it anyways. 

“Jesus. Okay. Jesus, Francis, yeah. Of course. I’m sorry.” He looks up at me and I see that his eyes are glossy. I want to step across the kitchen floor and kiss him on the mouth (but that’s not what we do). “I’m really...sorry.” 

“What do _you_ want?” He says in this voice that reminds me of how good he is, of how he smiles at me and makes me feel like we’re the only two people in a crowded room. I stare at him, thinking (knowing).

“You.” I whisper, and from the way he moves his hand up to his ear, old-mannish in a way that shouldn’t be endearing, I know he didn’t hear. “You.” I repeat, loud enough and clear enough that my cheeks color at my own boldness. 

And the next thing I know, Francis has slid down from his barstool, still in his winter coat, and pressed his tongue into my mouth. 

It shocks me every time he kisses me, no matter how many times it’s happened before, no matter how many hours I’ve spent laying awake, turning over his taste and warmth and heady, gasping breaths in my mind. His mouth tastes like liquor (I see him downing those mini bottles of whiskey, vodka, bourbon, on the plane, his leg bouncing) and cigarette smoke. It doesn’t taste bad. His face is very cold, the tip of his pointy, aristocratic nose like ice against my cheek as he pushes in closer. I get my hands up to his neck and struggle with the scarf, trying to unwind it blindly. There’s snow still melting on it, numbing my hands. He laughs, breaks away, and takes it off himself. 

“Richard.” He murmurs, pale lips red where I sucked at them. “I missed this.”

And it’s close enough to _I missed you_ that I let it fill me up with warmth. 

He sheds his greatcoat, too, letting it fall to the floor in a crumpled mass behind him. He’s wearing a starched, collared shirt underneath it, French by the looks of it. Pretty rich boy. He’s sweated through the armpits of it. He stands there, facing me, looking oddly vulnerable with his big stocking feet and his sweaty shirt and his travel-disheveled hair. 

“I missed this too.” I manage. _(You don’t know how much I missed this, Francis, you don’t know how many times I came crying your name.)_

I step forward, jerkily, almost losing my balance, really, and he catches me by the shoulders and pulls me the rest of the way in. 

“I don’t like...” Francis starts, looping his arms around my waist. I stare into his gaze, always embarrassed about eye contact but with nowhere else to look. “I don’t like being away from you. I don’t like being away from any of them, mind you, but... I really don’t want to be away from you.” I realize that my mouth is hanging slightly open in a foolish, congested way. I close it, swallow. I can feel his fingertips at the base of my spine, electrifying me like a criminal in the chair. (I remember Charles, drunk off his face one night shortly after we killed Bunny— _they’d kill us if they caught us. We’d deserve it too_.)

“I hated being here alone.” I say, candid in a way that I never want to be but that his angular hands and his soft, sleepy eyes seem to drag out of me. 

“Why didn’t you leave? Go to Henry’s? Have thanksgiving dinner with the twins?” His voice is quiet, the voice he uses when he reads aloud—all candlelit rooms and cushioned armchairs and Greek, easy on the tongue. 

“I don’t... know.” I reply, like a confession. Francis’s breath is warm on my face. I’m burning up inside with longing. “I really don’t, Francis.” My eyes are prickling on their own accord.

“Okay. That’s okay.” He drags a hand up my back, slow slow slow, and caresses my cheek, pushing a lock of scruffy hair behind my ear. “You need a haircut. Desperately.” 

“I know.” I half-laugh it.

“I’ll do it, if you want.” He’s smiling. 

“Really?” 

“Sure.” 

I close the distance between us, then, rocking up onto the balls of my feet to press my mouth to his. He says my name into my lips. He grips my hips so tight I think it may bruise. I want it to bruise. We shuffle backwards. He shoves me into the wall, right next to his refrigerator. My head bangs into the wallpapered wood, then lolls sideways. He bites the tender skin under my jawbone. I buck my hips, messy, desperate, reckless. 

Francis has me pinned to the wall with a skinny arm pressed across my chest and his bony hips jutting against mine. I wheeze into his mouth, grope raggedly at his flaming red hair. Francis, Francis, _Francis_ , whose cock I suck every chance I get, tucked away in the bathrooms of Henry’s house, in the backseat of his car when we drive out and park it in deserted lots. Francis, who would sit quietly and make tea and not speak a word about it after the fact when I was still drowning in the shame and guilt of it all. (And I still am, sometimes, randomly. I’ll sit up with his cum on my chin and suddenly feel rotten through to the bones, disgusting, worthless. And he’ll get me a drink and leave me alone. And later he’ll rub the tension out of my shoulders and tell me _it’s okay_ , and _you’re okay_ , and _there’s nothing wrong with you_.) But now, more often than not, he’ll pull out and I’ll roll over lazily, sweating, my chest and shoulders a mess of bruises, and catch him in a kiss. Now, more often than not, I’ll spread my legs for him and let him watch.

“Do you think of me?” Francis asks, suddenly. He’s panting, and his freckles are popping out on the creamy flush of his face. He is the marble to my gold, the light to my dark. It’s an odd question, and very much a Francis one, but I understand. I lean in to nip at his bottom lip, then nod. 

“Yes. Of course I do.”

“Because I think of you.”

“I know.” I say. His hands move to the top button of my shirt and undo it. I’m thrown back to that night in my dorm where _matters progressed_. “I know you do.” 

“I think about this.” He says, softly, bony fingers deftly undoing another button, and another and another, until I’m standing in front of him with my shirt open and hanging loose on my shoulders. He stoops, gangly, to press a kiss to my chest, over my heart. “And this.” His hands, still so alabaster cold, curl under my shirt and spread out over my bare back. “This, too.” 

“What else?” I breathe, wanting him to go further, wanting more. 

“This.” His hands travel around to the button of my slacks, undo it, pull the zipper. “And this.” He tugs them down in a swift, smooth motion so they pool around my ankles. My legs prick into gooseflesh in the chill of the apartment. 

“Bed?” I ask, forward but unable to be anything but. 

“That too.” He says it in a teasing lilt that almost makes me think he’s not going to indulge me, that he’ll laugh and leave me here, half dressed and hard. But then he’s pulling me away from the wall and steering me by the collar of my shirt into the bedroom as I kick off my pants. I’m stumbling backwards and blindly, and almost fall once, then again. Francis catches me both times, around the waist in a dramatic, bridal fashion. “I’ve been thinking about this for _days_.”

I nod, not sure that I trust myself to speak. Not sure that I won’t spill my heart and my guts if I open my mouth. 

He shoves me backwards, suddenly, and I drop back onto the bed with an exalted, druggie free-fall sensation in my stomach and chest. The moment he wriggles his way out of his shirt, I grab him and pull him on top of me in a messy, unmeditated pile. He gropes for my hips and we scramble backwards, a mess of limbs, until we’re lying more comfortably in the middle of his queen-sized bed. 

I want to say _fuck me_ and don’t. I want to say _take me, take all of me, it’s yours_. I don’t. I just clutch is face between my palms and kiss him, like the tree branch filled with fruit finally dropped low enough for Tantalus, after starving for centuries, to feast on. He opens his mouth wide enough that I feel my tongue slip over teeth. I lap at the roof of his mouth, wanting to taste him, wanting to curl up inside him and never, ever let him go. 

Francis lets me go, lets me suck and nip and gasp against his lips, until he pulls back and presses a finger to my mouth and I remember that, every time I feel like I’m in charge, it’s just a game he’s playing. Toying with me. That knowledge makes me so aroused and overheated that I feel like I may faint, all the blood in my body pooled in my cheeks and my erection. Francis is hard as well, against my leg, on top of me. I rut up into it. He presses his finger between my lips.

I suck at his digit, all the way up to the last knuckle. It’s so sloppy, so perverse, that a good percentage of me wants to launch myself out the window to my snowy death below. But a larger, more convincing percentage doesn’t, couldn’t, care. I bite down on his finger, relishing the way it makes his face go—slack, disbelieving, lashes fluttering. (The third or fourth time we fucked, I’d pulled hard at his hair in a floundering, disorientated moment of ecstasy, which his sudden, carnal growl only heightened. _“Francis,”_ I’d asked him afterwards, my head on his bare chest, _“you liked when I pulled your hair, didn’t you?”_ The look on his face—devilishly guilty, all downcast eyes and a subdued smirk—had struck me as so inexorably _hot_ that I’d barely been able to keep it together.)

“Take this off.” Francis mutters, tugging at the shirt that’s still hanging, unbuttoned, off of me. I sit up as much as I can with a partially-clothed redhead half-straddling me, and let him undress me. He pulls off his own pants—dressy, black, mildly creased from the flight and from our activities—and then we’re both laying there in nothing but boxer shorts, breathing hard. “Richard...” Francis starts, and suddenly, I cannot handle it for another second. 

“Come on. Please. I don’t want to wait anymore, _please_ —“ My voice cracks with throaty desperation, and Francis yanks my boxers off with a grin on his face that could almost be construed as cruel. 

He keeps his lube in the right-hand nightstand, and I nearly break my neck scrambling for it as he strips off his underwear and slips under the sheets—it’s too cold to have our bare asses hanging out like this, though I wouldn’t really mind it anyways. I’d freeze to death in his arms, joyfully. 

“God...” He says, one arm folded behind his head and a visible tent in the sheets, with all the airs of a boy prince—lazily handsome, dominating, spoiled. I stare back at him, simultaneously relishing and shrinking away from the way his eyes trace over every inch of my naked body. “Has anyone ever told you that you are goddamn gorgeous, Papen?”

“No.” I whisper, kneeling with the lube clutched in my fists, my cock hard and leaking against my stomach and on display for him, for his greedy gaze. 

“Come here.” His chest is thin and pale and dotted with moles. I want to kiss every one of them. I crawl over the bedspread and slip under it next to him. His breath is hot on my face. His hands roam over my chest, my back, down over my ass. I’m not expecting it when he grabs my cock, and the touch forces so much air into my lungs so quickly that I choke on it. He touches my face until the coughing subsides, eyebrows knit together with a sort of worry that doesn’t carry over in the way he twists his fist around my cock. 

I whine aloud, a shiver working its way down my spine. I scoot closer to him, closer still, desperate to feel his skin (his _cock_ ) against me. 

“I,” I start, in a moment of boldness. Francis bites a hickey into my collarbone. “I may have touched myself while you were gone. And thought of you.” 

“Is that so?” Francis answers, cocking an eyebrow towards his delicate, widows-peaking hairline. “Just once?”

He always knows the spots to push at, the ones that’ll make me fall apart in his grip. He runs a finger along my perineum.

“More—more than once.” 

“Yeah.” He murmurs, as if he was interrogating me while already knowing the whole truth. “God, Richard. Pretty, needy boy.”

“I’m not...” I start, but I _am_ , and we both know it. He takes the bottle of lube from me and coats the fingers on one hand. 

“You should have called me.” He says, in my ear, as he coaxes my thighs apart with his non-lubed hand. “I would have helped.”

“You wanted to have fucking _phone sex_ while at your grandmother’s house in Boston?” I ask, grinning a little bit. “Really?” 

“I would have found a way.” He says, laughter in his voice. “Besides. I was doing the same thing.” 

“Oh?” The thought of it makes every nerve in my body flutter. Perhaps it makes sense that he would be, but I never imagined it. 

“Uh huh.” He sounds focused, tugging the sheet half-off of me so he can see what he’s doing. I don’t protest. “I did things like...this.” He presses two lube-covered fingers against my rim and I _writhe_ , jaw lolling open. 

“Fuck.” My voice doesn’t sound like my own. “Fuck, Fran, _more_.” I spread my legs as far as I can, desperate. 

“And things like this.” His voice is quiet, directed, as the slick shove and push of a finger in my ass unravels me from the inside out. He presses a kiss to my temple that I am too far gone to return. 

“More.” My vocabulary, it seems, has been reduced down to that word and a disjointed string of expletives. I bear down on his hand, squirming for pressure and heat and _release_. 

“Greedy.” Francis murmurs in my ear, teeth nipping at the soft skin behind it. _I know I am, Francis. For you. Only for you._ He adds another finger. Things are overexposed and fuzzy around the edges. I utter a sob and twist to get my tongue in his mouth, because it’s the only thing I _can_ do. His fingers are so long inside me, casually hitting things that I have to work to get at myself. And I want _more more more._

“Fuck me.” I say, the words tripping out of my mouth, and it sounds so lewdly pornographic that I clap a hand over my eyes so I won’t have to look at him. Francis’s thin fingers, the same as the ones that curl inside me, wrap around my wrist and pull it away. He’s smiling, gentle. A sob breaks open in my chest. “Please.” 

“Shh. Let me take care of you.” 

So I do. I give myself over, limp and boneless on the mattress with sweat on my face and behind my knees as he works a third finger into me, the stretch a lovely, hot burn. He talks to me, sweet, murmured words that I don’t quite hear or can’t quite make out. I think he’s speaking in Greek. I cling to him and rock down on his fingers. 

A fourth. A broken moan leaves my lips, and, god, it hurts, but deliciously. It’s been too long since I’ve been stretched out like this. Francis presses kisses into both of my eyelids, calling me _sweet boy, darling, lovely, so good for me_. My cock is painful and untouched but I don’t want to be the one who puts a hand on it. 

Then, startlingly, I feel his thumb edging at my rim and clench around his fingers in surprise. He moans a little bit into my ear and, I can’t help it, the heat that noise sends through me forces me to relax. 

“Okay?” He whispers. “I’ll stop if—“

I cut him off. “I’m good.” He’s fisted me before, once. We were in a hotel room. It was raining. He’d been wearing a silk tie and lacy, ladies panties, and I had come so hard that I’d almost blacked out. From his face, I know he’s thinking of that too. 

My inner thighs are slick with lube. My chest is rising and falling rapidly with my breathing. Francis bites down on my earlobe and eases his thumb inside. 

The sound that I make is squeaking, pathetic, hardly human. The stretch is making me _delirious_ , the pain and pleasure so overwhelming that I can barely breathe through it.

“Good boy.” Francis says. His hand brushes my prostate. “There you are.” My eyes roll back, my jaw slack and, embarrassingly, spit coating my chin, and I’m in danger of coming untouched when he pulls his fingers out of me. The emptiness is so sudden and harsh that my hole clenches down on it, hard, for several seconds, sending my legs into quaking spasms. I turn my face to Francis, tears in my eyes, and he kisses me until I can breathe properly again, his mouth so hot and familiar and correct. 

“Baby,” he says, and the pet name floors me, “you took that so good.” I curl into his side, still so slick and open and ready that it’s hard to think. “Here, let me jerk you off, sweet thing.” 

“Wait,” I murmur, staring into his lovely, open face, “wait, aren’t you going to fuck me?” His expression goes blank for a moment before curling into a grin that turns my entire body to jelly. 

“You haven’t had enough?” I scrape my nails down his chest. He has a hickey on his right shoulder that I don’t fully remember giving to him. I shake my head, unwilling to say it. “Okay.” He breathes, and the next thing I know he’s guiding me over to my chest and knees, my cheek pressed into a pillow that already smells of sex. 

I lay there, heartbeat in my ears, as Francis leans over me to procure a condom from the bedside table. I want to watch him roll it on, watch the action that matches the small grunt he makes behind me, but I don’t trust my arms to push me up. I hear the slick of lube, his sighs, and then his head is at my shoulder and I’m turning to catch him in a kiss. 

I want to say something specific to him. I don’t. 

“Ready?” He asks, sweat already gathering between where his chest presses into my back. I can feel his ribs against me. 

“Yes.” I say. 

He pushes in slow, slow, slow, as if I’m a virgin and he doesn’t want to hurt me. I bite down on my forearm and tremble under the holy, wonderful pressure building inside me. Francis’s cock is _long_ , long enough to hit me where I need it whether he’s trying to or not. He presses his mouth, hot and wet and open, to my shoulder, and moans so loud that I know his neighbors can hear it. 

“ _Richard._ ” He pants. “Jesus.” Francis, forever able to multitask (reading Ancient Greek literature while scrambling me eggs, knotting his tie while leaning over to kiss Camilla on the cheek), reaches around and grabs my cock in his smooth palm. 

“Wait,” I say, breathing hard and fast, “I’m gonna come.”

“Alright.” Francis says into my shoulder. He licks a long stripe into it, and maybe it should disgust me, but it does the opposite. He doesn’t stop moving his hand and his hips. “Do it.” 

And, a beat later, I am, as he thrusts into me furiously, broken curses intermingled with my name falling from his lips. I clench down on his cock and whine into my arm and come and come and _come_. Francis digs his nails into my hips and goes and goes and then he’s shooting off too, trembling so hard that he collapses down on top of me. 

There’s several shuddering moments where the only sounds are the two of us trying desperately to catch our breath. Francis’s forehead rests on my sweaty shoulder. I reach a hand back and bury it in his hair. 

“Good?” I ask, finally, and he gives a short, guttural laugh. 

“Better than good.” He pulls out, and I turn over, get my arms around his neck, and kiss him. 

I’m laying in my own cum, but I don’t want to move out from under him. He removes the condom, ties it, and tosses it off to the side. We’re grinning at each other, lazily, in a way that’s so dopey that in any other moment I’d be blushing and adjusting my collar and making excuses to leave. Instead, I kiss him again. He smells like cum and sweat. Gorgeous. 

“Hey,” he says, after a while, brushing my hair off my damp forehead. “Want me to take you for lunch?” 

I start to laugh, and can’t stop once I get going. “Thank god.” I say between giggles, putting a hand on his quizzically amused face. “You don’t have _shit_ to eat here.”

**Author's Note:**

> Whew. Anyways, I have two things to say.  
> 1\. Richard Papen is UNDENIABLY a bottom, or at the VERY most a hesitant vers. That’s just canon sorry.  
> 2\. If you comment I will love you for fucking ever.


End file.
